RT: ISRAEL ARMY VETERANS TEACH ARMED SELF-DEFENSE TO US JEWS.
I comment on this story. “Israeli army veterans in US train up for self-defense…

“Once people are ready for action, somehow action finds them,” said Danny Schechter, who is an analyst and a Jewish American himself. …”

A LAMENT FOR LABOR DAY

IT’S ONE THING TO WRITE ABOUT OTHERS LOSING THEIR JOBS, BUT WHAT HAPPENS WHEN IT HAPPENS TO YOU?

By Danny Schechter
Author of The Crime Of Your Time

When your life and your work is as entwined as mine has been—fusing the personal and the political over all these years, it may be stretching things to consider yourself unemployed but that’s what I am as Labor Day approaches.

Most of the media focuses on the big companies that have slashed their work forces (even as they hoard cash.) But small companies are also suffering, cutting back, and closing. They don’t get the subsidies or bailouts or the attention.

Companies like ours!

Last May, we decided to close our Globalvision office when the lease was up. Our costs remained too high while revenues had dropped. We realized that we ourselves had become victims of the economic calamity that I had been warning about, and urging who ever would listen to respond to. It was, suddenly, not about someone else’s problems. They had literally come home.

There was no escaping it: after nearly 24 years in a business that sometime seemed more like a crusade, the handwriting was on the wall as the coffers shrank and threatened to become a coffin.

Like most of our countrymen and women, we had lost confidence in the economy. Taking on a new lease would have meant personally guaranteeing it. That seemed like a road to bankruptcy.

Our option: go virtual with a post office box (POB 677, New York l0035) while revamping the Globalvision.org website.

It took us a month to pack up our lives, our gear, edit rooms, tapes and archive. There were also our awards and memorabilia, and other artifacts of a video production company that was always churning new videos and films. The market for what we had always done seemed to have vanished; the foundations that sometimes bankrolled our work had lost millions in the markets and had turned to new flavors of the week.

Our story was considered old. We may have been the last believers.

The busyness of wrapping it all up was exhausting over the course of a month. A patrimony which we always believed had value was moved into boxes, and then into storage, packed away in large warehouse structures, crammed behind steel doors with only a number on the door. It had the feel of a prison.

We moved back into to apartments we had for years left early in the morning and returned to late at night. Sometimes they didn’t feel much like homes because to keep a small, undercapitalized company alive for decades demanded long hours on a treadmill with no margins for failure.

I remembered a summer cab ride years ago when we drove through Central Park on the way to the airport. The place was packed with people having fun. It was a shock to be confronted with how much we were missing while staring into TV screens in dark edit rooms.

Soon, I was setting up a home office, but why-was I doing it? Could it be I just I didn’t know what else to do? I put in a new phone only to watch it not ring. It was the hottest summer in recent times and at points I felt like I was working in an oven. I became addicted to club soda, cases of the stuff.

We were media independents in a world where everyone is forced to be dependent—on jobs, clients and grants. By necessity, we had to become hustlers, doing more for less, undercutting competitors and working our asses off. The joys of being entrepreneurs became playing at capitalism without capital. It left us little time for development or to cultivate funders and even sustain friendships.

We may have been well known in the “business” but sometimes lost touch with ourselves.

All work and no play….

Driven by passion, mission and perhaps illusion, I made a film a year, sometimes more. I was always multi-tasking, cutting corners, doing more than I should. I wrote blogs, sometimes compared to Dead Sea scrolls because they rivaled them in length.

I wrote books, eleven of them if you can believe while doing everything else. I was constantly in motion but without a lot of movement. We didn’t realize how many in the industry we aspired to work in were threatened by out values and political choices, or just ignored us because we were not commercial enough.

There was always the hope that somewhere, somehow, manna would fall from heaven or perhaps from a patron or two.

Sometimes it happened, more than you would believe, as we enchanted a French Countess, an English visionary and an Italian publisher. Being Global had its rewards as my frequent flyer miles piled up, and globetrotting intensified.

It was a whirlwind of activity, and I haven’t thought about it deeply enough yet to regret it. We didn’t achieve all our goals but I, for one, am proud of having tried.

When it tapered off, not by choice but necessity, I was not really prepared for the suddenness of being alone, feeling cast off without a daily agenda, or schedule. I felt like I had nowhere to go. The emails shrunk, the requests turned into a trickle as new generations of producers took their rightful place. Everyone now was a producer, and many could afford to work for nothing. Suddenly, we had become too pricey.

I am sure that led to moments of despair, even depression but I have persevered. I am sure many people who are out of work can identify with the sense of loss and insecurity.

My first nights were sleepless, consumed by anxiety. What would I do? Is there an Act 3 for an aging workhorse? Did our dream die? Were we fools to believe we could challenge, much less compete with BIG media.

I try to keep busy but, now, I was mostly a lone ranger, alone, out of my office refuge or womb that had sheltered me for so long. We are trying to keep Globalvision alive but if it was hard with an office. It may be impossible without one.

It’s not that I have been just laying around. I have been spending my time trying to promote my film Plunder The Crime Of Our Time which came out at the end of April. I’ve been appearing on many media interviews but major media outlets still seem uninterested in the multi-trillion dollar crimes of Wall Street. They prefer to react to celebrity droppings and whatever contrived hot-button issue on the right-wing agenda like the Mosque that may never be built at Ground Zero.

In the meantime, I have also become a shipping department, packaging DVDs and book orders received over our website and trekking to the Post Office where the clerks are tired of seeing my face. There’s always something wrong with a zip code or scribbled address. If I have any talent, this is not one. Paypal is not my pal.

I began to feeling like a failure even as I kept imploring whoever who would listen to act on economic issues. I thought I was persuasive but with little observable impact. Given the lack of leadership at the top and the well funded opposition on the right, It seems like the economy will bring down the Democrats and even more of our livelihoods.

It’s so much easier to ridicule Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck that fight Wall Street. Their icons are out organizing; “ours” are just bitching..

I have done many promotional media appearances but the summer is known for low viewing and listening. The networks I used to work for were trapped in predictable coverage routines, not open to my ravings.

The one surprise I have had is the interest in foreign broadcasters in what I have to say. So, your news dissector is now on Iran’s Press TV, Russia Today and Al Jazeera as opposed the Daily Show and MSNBC. Strange. The only consolation is they may have more viewers.

The other day South Africa’s Ambassador in Sweden called after he saw me commenting on Glenn Beck’s Sermon From The Steps Of The Lincoln Memorial on Al Jazeera. There I was, via satellite, from a studio here to his set in Stockholm.

Globalvision by other means!

So, the irony is I have been in the media more after shuttering our media office than ever.

Is it having an impact? Hard to know. Instead of blogging daily. I am writing weekly commentaries. I am tweeting and Face Booking, “Trying “ is the operative word but as my income declines, the precariousness of my longer-term situation becomes more evident.

I am hanging on, and hanging out.

Yet, when I look at realities in Haiti, or Pakistan or even back in the Bronx I came out of, I count my blessings. I am, knock, knock, not living on the edge of desperation like so many, not yet anyway, and still relatively healthy.

I know that joblessness is a killer for many, leading to family breakups, personal breakdowns, and sickness, physical and mental. We now have a million homeless kids in our schools.

On a more personal level, getting older sucks, but it happens to all of us.

Yes, I have more time to relax, see more movies, even do more walking. I seem to be watching the world more and more from my window. I try to contain my own fears, check my political frustration and remain positive even during hot summer days of disorientation and feeling down.

When that happens, I think of a book from my college years, actually written about the town, Ithaca New York, where I went to College . (It’s Mythica to me now.) The book: “Been Down So Long, It Looks Like Up To Me.”

Unemployment for me is not necessarily as bad as it could be but I don’t have kids to support. I am not facing foreclosure. I am not totally caught in the Debt Trap. I am not under the severe pressure so many others are facing. I am so alarmed by the lack of job creation and benefit extension programs.

The economic prognosis is not good.

I am still trying to fuse money and meaning. I am also still getting invitations to travel. I’ll be speaking in London in September and in Tashkent later this fall, if you can believe.

And so, yes again, I am happy to be here, to be alive, to have a roof over my head, to have some forum for my ideas.

I have to count many blessings. Isn’t that what it always comes down to? I have done more than I ever thought I ever would but nothing lasts forever.

I think of all the media companies I worked for. Many are no longer around. I outlasted them.

When I voted for change last November, I didn’t realize how my own circumstances would change so radically and force me to navigate in more turbulent waters. I know I am not alone. Many in the Indy Media sector are in the same leaky boat.

So I am out of work on this Labor Day, laboring to keep going, hoping my luck will turn.

I am trying to look ahead, not back. I still care, maybe too much.

What’s next?

Uncertainty is the only certainty.

News Dissector Danny Schechter directed the film Plunder About the Crimes of Wall Street. (PlunderTheCrimeOfOurTime.com) Comments to dissector@mediachannel.org

MORE CRIME OF OUR TIME: A CONNECTION YOU MAY HAVE MISSED

The Financial Crisis Inqury Commission has been debating responsibility fir the collapse of that mega firm Lehman. The Wall Street Journal reported:

“Commission Chairman Phil Angelides, citing emails in which Bush administration officials worried about public reaction to a potential Lehman bailout, said emerging evidence shows government officials made “a conscious policy decision not to rescue” the investment bank.

In one email, according to a commission document, the then-Treasury chief of staff, Jim Wilkinson, wrote on Sept. 9, 2008, that he couldn’t “stomach us bailing out lehman. Will be horrible in the press.”

In another email on Sept. 14, Mr. Wilkinson wrote: “No way govt money is coming in … also just did a call with the WH [White House] and usg [U.S. government] is united behind no money … I think we are headed for winddown” absent a private purchase.

Mr. Wilkinson declined to comment Wednesday.”

I won’t decline to comment!

I can’t stomach Jim Wilkinson who, unmentioned here, was the political aparatchik behind the lie factory called the Coalition Media Center in Qatar before the US invasion if Iraq, an event everyone admits was based on lies and deceptions. (See him in action, first in Florida in 2000 shutting down a Miami recount and then in The War wearing a uniform in my film WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception (2004)

Wilkinson was the propagandist in chief behind the Iraq War, a total Bush Administration tool and later promited to work as former Goldman CEO Hank Paulson’s PR flunky.

The fall of Goldman nearly toppled the entire economy!

Join me at News Dissector Radio on ProgressiveRadioNetwork.com 10 AM to 11 AM EDT. Guests: Thomas Geoghegan, Union Lawyer/Author and Harvey Z. Warren. We will be discussing DEBT and the American Dream.

Your comments welcome: dissector@mediachannel.org

From the Economic Warrior Website: BARRY JAMES DYKE INTERVIEWS YOUR NEWS DISSECTOR ON THE MEDIA AND THE ECONOMY

HOW MANY BP ADS DID YOU SEE AND READ PLEDGING “WE WILL MAKE THIS RIGHT?” Now the company has admitted spending $93 million on advertising and propaganda, three times more than they told Congress.

COMMENTS ON THE PRESIDENT’S IRAQ SPEECH

Al Jazeera Report:

A recent CBS News poll found 72 per cent of Americans now believe the war was not worth the loss of American lives.

A large contingent of combat-ready US troops remain in the country but the Iraqi army is now formally in charge of its own security.

Obama’s declaration comes amid continuing violence and a stalemate in efforts to form a new government six months after an inconclusive election.

The impasse in Iraq has raised tensions as politicians squabble over power and insurgents carry out attacks aimed at undermining faith in domestic security forces.”

ANTI-WAR ACTIVIST: More War Lies By David Swanson

Lies aren’t used just to start wars, but also to escalate them, continue them, and even reduce or end them. And we got a pile of war lies from the president Tuesday evening.

Obama claimed the war on Iraq was initially a war to disarm a state. Really? And then “terrorist” Iraqis attacked our troops in their country. Yet if they had done that in our country, I suspect they would still be the terrorists. And then it became a civil war which we were innocently caught up in. Uh huh.

U.S. participants in this crime are heroes, always and everywhere. That’s sacred. The troops’ mission has involved protecting the Iraqi people, and by golly they’ve done a superb job, as long as we don’t mention the complete devastation of Iraq, the million dead, the millions of refugees, and the intense resentment of those remaining toward our country for what we’ve done to theirs.

The Iraqi people now (dead, in exile, in a ruined nation) have a chance that they supposedly didn’t have before we destroyed their country, a country that was actually a better place to live in in every way in 2003 than it is now, and in 1989 than in 2003. To hear President Obama, this war has been for the benefit of the Iraqi people, and these wars have been about al Qaeda and 9-11.’

EXPERT ON IRAQ
The Speech President Obama Should Give About the Iraq War (But Won’t) by Juan Cole

Here is the speech that I wish President Obama would give about the Iraq War, but which neither he nor any other president ever will.

Fellow Americans, and Iraqis who are watching this speech, I have come here this evening not to declare a victory or to mourn a defeat on the battlefield, but to apologize from the bottom of my heart for a series of illegal actions and grossly incompetent policies pursued by the government of the United States of America, in defiance of domestic US law, international treaty obligations, and both American and Iraqi public opinion.

OBAMA SPEECH ON IRAQ 2002

What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income — to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression.

That’s what I’m opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics….

LAMESTREAM MEDIA

WASHINGTON POST: President Obama’s Oval Office speech was good, but the iconography was great.

In his address marking the effective end of the Iraq War, Obama used the setting well. The flags behind him, the family pictures on either side, the flag pin in his lapel, the red tie, white shirt and blue suit… it all projected patriotism and authority.

FOX NEWS:Style Over Substance In Obama’s Iraq Speech

He said what he had to say. He read his Teleprompter well and without stumbling. He lined up all the used-to-death clichés in an orderly line. And that was all there was to the president’s nationally televised address on Tuesday night.

We haven’t left peace and success behind in Iraq. We’ve left a fiasco of a failure. For more than five months the president and his administration have signally desisted from knocking together the heads of the Iraqi politicians who still haven’t been able to even form the pretense of a new national government

RON PAUL: “AN END OR AN ESCALATION?”

Amid much fanfare last week, the last supposed “combat” troops left Iraq as the administration touted the beginning of the end of the Iraq War and a change in the role of the United States in that country. Considering the continued public frustration with the war effort, and with the growing laundry list of broken promises, this was merely another one of the administration’s operations in political maneuvering and semantics in order to convince an increasingly war-weary public that the Iraq War is at last ending. However, military officials confirm that we are committed to intervention in that country for years to come, and our operations have in fact, changed minimally, if really at all.

After eight long draining years, I have to wonder if our government even understands what it is to end a war anymore. The end of a war, to most people, means all the troops come home, out of harm’s way. It means we stop killing people and getting killed. It means we stop sending troops and armed personnel over and draining our treasury for military operations in that foreign land. But much like the infamous “mission accomplished” moment of the last administration, this “end” of the war also means none of those things.

50,000 US troops remain in Iraq, and they are still receiving combat pay. One soldier was killed in Basra just last Sunday, after the supposed end of combat operations, and the same day 5,000 men and women of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment at Fort Hood were deployed to Iraq. Their mission will be anything but desk duty. Among other things they will accompany the Iraqi military on dangerous patrols, continue to be involved in the hunt for terrorists, and provide air support for the Iraqi military. They should be receiving combat pay, because they will be serving a combat role!

AL-MALIKI: The Unelected Prime Minister Of The Government That Does Not Exist

“Iraq today is sovereign and independent,” al-Maliki told the country in a televised speech commemorating the pullback by American forces from leading the battle against Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias.

“I promise you the sectarian war will not return. We will not allow it. Iraqis will live as loving brothers,” al-Maliki said, adding that his troops were up to the fight.”

CRITIQUE OF MEDIA COVERAGE OF THE “END” OF THE WAR

Your comments welcome: dissector@mediachannel.org